I wanted to post a lil something about a trade I made back in November. I went long OPEN on the morning of 22nd, at 68.00$, and unfortunately made a poor sell and sold a bit too soon on 12/15 at 68.44$.

Unfortunately, I had no reason so sell; I let the heavy volume dump scared me like a little girl. As a result, the stock held the 50dma (I sell after it breaks thru), and raced right on up past 100$ and is trading at $105 now, leaving me behind. The goal here is to illustrate how I think trading comes off as very complex and thus discourages a lot of people looking to get into the game. It is simple, and probably the "stupider" you are, the less you are going to try to fight the market. Hint, market always wins.

Here is a thread on 2p2's Business, Finance, and Investing forum, specifically dedicated to the stock, OPEN: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/30...ntable-957464/
**The thread dedicated to OPEN starts mid Jan. If you check out the monthly trading thread ( I wouldn't bother with the junk there) people talked about the stock thru nov and dec as well.

The first thing you see is a lot of numbers. I have no clue what any of these probably mean. I don't care. If they work for you great. I certainly don't need them, at least the way I learned to trade. In short, I could give two shits about anyones analysis in that thread pertaining to how OPEN should behave, because all that matters is simple price and volume (aside from CANSLIM fundamentals, which I look up very easily with some software). Price and vol doesn't lie. And more than likely, the players with the big money know something you don't and have there own reasons for clearly accumulating OPEN.

6th post in- why OPEN is a short:
I don't give any weight to anything said here, and have 0 plans on learning what any of it means. You don't need to either.

Throughout the thread, theres a handful of the regs in the BFI forums that talk about how they are shorting/betting against OPEN and some stuff on how its overvalued. Hell look at post 53. That is just mind blowing. I just scrolled to the end of his post and saw that based on his stuff, he thinks its a short. 56 is super long too, basically ending with I'm prob shorting.

Finally, 59 posts in, someone gets it right:
Ding ding, your opinions/valuations don't mean shit. Yet so many people are trying to come up with reasons. I don't bother with any sort of complex analysis. I'm sure a lot of the analysis ppl are taking about with wahtever numbers theyre throwing out there are correct. However, stocks can remain over/undervalued for a longgg time. Good luck shorting OPEN at 75 and not getting squeezed. I think how I learned trading is much easier...

I go thru my scans each day after the market closes (4pm EST). You can create your own filters and requirements and whatnot, pretty easily. Like I've never done computer science easy. I run a few scans; somedays I have to screen 300 stocks. Somedays I have 0. I barely even bother scanning for shorts because it's so difficult to make money there. Getting good at the technical analysis-looking at charts- is easy to pick up in my opinion, and is easy to learn. By scanning thru what stocks have exploded in the past, you catch onto what the characteristics are, and what the charts look like. Also, all the books I've rec'd in the past have in depth reviews, explaing the charts. If I had to guess, you can figure out proper buys after a few weeks of trying. Will you have mastered it? Nooo, and you probably won't even be close to as good compared to any trader with more experience than you. But as you keep learning, you keep honing your chart reading skills. Personally, I like looking at charts and finding patterns. I think successful poker players are built that way, too. I'd love to see a lot of people give it a go.

After going thru my scans for maybe 30 minutes, I go back to the stocks that have proper TA signals and check out the fundamentals on marketsmith (additional software). MS is like 1k/yr, and just gives the fundamentals for you very clean, fast, and easy. I'm lazy like that and don't wanna ever have to look at balance sheets. The info on MS is available on investors.com as well, for much much less. If the fundamentals are good enough, I login to my broker, type in how many shares I wanna buy and the ticker symbol. I click preview, and that shows me how much is in the position. I'm too lazy to even grind the math on how many shares equals X amount $. I have an idea of what percent of my account I wanna trade, given the downside risk (easily picked up from chart) and the amount I care to put my portfolio at risk. Mental math stuffs. So I decide, hey 50 shares of XYZ, hit preview and it shows a 7k position. I wanted something closer to 10k, so i change 50 shares to 66, hit preview, and see its close enough to 10k. Good to go, hit submit.

I'd imagine the process takes 30-1hr and does not require ya to sit thru the trading day. I don't bother with CNBC. Or any other news. It's all garbage. It's just more opinions on how stocks should be acting. The only thing that matters is what's really happening, hence why I only look at price and volume. I'm doing my best to keep learning, so I can avoid being shaken out of OPEN; sitting on the sidelines as it rockets up is no fun. Especially when people are like OMG theres no way this can be happening rawrarawrr.

Doing maybe 1hr of work in trading, at any time I choose, from any country I want is what I plan to be doing after poker. Keeping it very simple. It's right up a lot of poker players' alleys. I'm sure this is gonna get a ton of LOLs bc I don't even know what P/E ratios mean. I really don't care. It's just another opinion.